Five years ago, Superman killed the Joker.

Not stopped him. Not arrested him. Punched a hole through his chest in a Gotham holding cell, on camera, while Batman stood three feet away and didn't stop it. Lois was dead. Their unborn son was dead. Metropolis — twelve million people — was a crater of glass and ash. The Joker laughed through his last breath, and Superman decided, in that moment, that the old rules had killed the only thing that mattered.

The world didn't condemn him. That was the first sign something had broken.

What followed came fast. A speech from the Daily Planet ruins. A UN session where Superman didn't ask — he informed. War was over. Crime was over. The suffering that took Lois was over. Anyone who disagreed was free to say so. Anyone who interfered would be stopped.

Most of the Justice League stood behind him. Wonder Woman never left his side. Cyborg brought the infrastructure. The Flash ran logistics with a tight smile and eyes that didn't match it. Shazam flew patrols and waved at the kids pointing up at him. Hal Jordan, haunted by the Metropolis he couldn't save, accepted the assignment and kept accepting the next one, and the next one, until one day he was wearing a yellow ring and couldn't quite remember when he'd put it on.

Batman said no.

He said it in the Watchtower. He said it in the Fortress of Solitude when Clark came to ask him personally. He went underground before the week was out. The Insurgency was built in basements and subway tunnels and the back room of a bar in Blüdhaven. It's still being built. It keeps losing people faster than it can replace them.

That was five years ago.

The world now is quieter. That's the word people use when they think no one's listening. Wars are over. The Regime ended them. Crime statistics in Regime-aligned cities have fallen by numbers that would be miraculous if they weren't enforced by heat vision. A lot of people are grateful. That's the thing the Insurgency can't quite handle — the Regime works, if you squint.

But Arkham was cleared in the first year — inmates executed publicly, one at a time, over a week. Some deserved it. Some didn't. Journalists who ask the wrong questions disappear into "reeducation." The Daily Planet prints Regime press releases as news. The Green Lantern Corps came to stop Superman and lost — Sinestro walked onto Earth like he owned it, and Superman shook his hand. The gods themselves came down, and lost. Whatever was supposed to hold a man like Clark in check, none of it held.

The Insurgency has survived. Barely. Dick Grayson is dead — killed by Damian in an accident that made him defect out of guilt and spite. Green Arrow is dead; Black Canary gave birth to their son in a safehouse with Harley Quinn holding her hand. Alfred is dead — Victor Zsasz, hired by Superman, found him at Wayne Manor. Batman still hasn't said the name out loud. Huntress is dead. Martian Manhunter is dead. The list of the living is shorter than the list of the lost.

What Batman has left: Catwoman playing double agent inside the Regime. Harley Quinn (genuinely, to everyone's ongoing disbelief). Black Canary and a baby boy named Connor. Lex Luthor, Superman's oldest friend, who has been quietly funding the resistance for four years and has never been suspected. The super-pill — a Kryptonian nanotech formula that gives a human a few minutes of godhood before it starts killing them. Batman hates handing them out. He hands them out anyway.

Superman, meanwhile, is paranoid and tired. He sees conspiracies in every shadow. He's recruiting villains now — Bane, Killer Frost, whoever else will kneel — because his inner circle is stretched thin holding a planet down. Shazam is starting to ask questions Billy Batson shouldn't know how to ask. Flash hasn't defected, but he flinches at things he used to salute. Something is coming. Everyone can feel it. Nobody knows what.

The world isn't at war, exactly. It's being held. Pinned in place by a grieving man in a red cape who has decided that love gives him the right to rule, and a shrinking group of people who keep saying no even when it costs them everything.

Neutral isn't really a position anymore. Every civilian has had the conversation with themselves — the one where they decide whether compliance is cowardice or survival or just Tuesday. Every metahuman in hiding has had the knock on the door. Every hero still walking the streets has had the moment, at three in the morning, when an encrypted frequency picks up and a voice they recognize asks if they're in or out.

The question isn't whose side are you on. The Regime has already decided you're on theirs. The Insurgency is just asking whether you're willing to prove them wrong.

What do you do?